MUSICAL BOOKENDS

The coming weekend will be even more active than usual - at least musically - along Lincoln Road Mall in Miami Beach.

On one end, at the Lincoln Theatre, a portion of the New World Symphony will kick off Florida International University's second annual May in Miami/Young Composers Festival of contemporary music.

Simultaneously, at the Colony Theater on the other end of the mall, members of the Greater Miami Opera's Young Artist and Technical Apprentice Program will present their own production of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte. (This is the 10th anniversary of the program.) The orchestra will come from another portion of the New World Symphony.

There is one more connection between the two events besides the orchestral source. Both will deal with the 20th century - modern sounds in the case of the concerts, an updating of the time setting in the case of Mozart's comedy.

The FIU project combines education and exposure. Young composers from around the country will participate in master classes during the day, when their works will be discussed by a team of established composers - Pauline Oliveros, Tania Leon, Bernard Rands and Donald Martino - and three FIU faculty members: Fredrick Kaufman, Orlando Jacinto Garcia and Jon Christopher Nelson.

The first few days of the festival will be at FIU's Tamiami Campus, with those lectures and free concerts of works by the young composers. The action moves to Lincoln Road for the New World's performance of music by the seven featured composers.

Friday's program includes the world premier of Garcia's Auschwitz (nunca se olvidaran) for chorus and orchestra.

"Ever since I heard Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima in 1979, I have wanted to write a piece about the Holocaust," Garcia said last week. "It is a quiet, meditative piece, kind of a prayer to those who died. The words nunca se olvidaran, 'They will never be forgotten,' are recited softly, never sung."

The South Florida premiere of Kaufman's Kaddish for cello and string orchestra will be performed on Saturday.

"Both my parents died in 1986 within six months of each other," the composer said. "The second time around, I didn't attend shiva [the ritual of mourning); I just couldn't do it. This piece is my prayer for them."

Local premieres dominate both programs: Rands' Madrigali, Nelson's Chamber Symphony, Martino's Saxophone Concerto, Leon's Kabiosile for piano and orchestra. These works will cover a wide range of styles.

Farthest afield is likely to be one more world premiere - Tropical Air by Oliveros, the most avant-garde and experimental of this group. Her piece will involve performers onstage and moving through the audience while she recites her own text.

-- There will be nothing quite so unusual when Cosi fan tutte is performed by the Miami Opera's young artists, with technical support from young apprentices. But purists may be surprised by some things.

Director John Norris has moved the action from late 18th century Naples to 1908 Vienna. The story remains the same - a wise guy named Don Alfonso bets two young men that their girlfriends will turn unfaithful within a day.

"I think people have misconceptions about the 18th century," he said. "Productions set in that time tend to get frilly. When people see all those corsets and long dresses, they forget the characters are human. And in Cosi, all the sexual jokes and innuendoes are usually whitewashed out."

Norris, who teaches acting and body movement for the Metropolitan Opera's Young Artist Development Program, does not tamper with an opera's original setting without reason.

"First, I got inspired by Gustav Klimt's painting The Kiss," he said, "and I wondered how I could use it. When I realized it was done in Vienna in the period of Freud, I thought this is perfect. I didn't want to do the opera in a buffo, slapstick, play-to-the-audience style, as it is often done. I wanted to include the darker, shadowy things that are in Cosi.

"A lot of feminists think of this as a male-chauvinist-pig opera, but it doesn't have to be that. At the end, Don Alfonso says that the guys are as guilty as the women; deceit and betrayal are equally wrong."